April « 2007 « Berto’s Blog

Archive for April, 2007

Storms….

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

This morning the Orlando area, and really pretty much the entire eastern United States has been dealing with storms ranging from snow to wind to thunder storms. Here in Orlando we had Wind, Rain and T-Storms that passed through this morning.

I like to sleep in, and when I got up at 10:30 I looked outside and noticed that it was very slightly raining. Around 11 I checked the window again, and there wasnt any change, so I went into the shower. Just as I got out of the shower, turned off the bathroom light and opened the door, the power in my building went out. Just for a split second though. Since the clock came back on I tried to turn on the sink light, but it did not work. Next I tried my light, and that was acting more like a strobe light, and finally checked my roomates light, which was very dim. All my electronics were shut down, except for my clock which managed to keep the time despite the fact that I never put a battery in it.

I booted up my computer and discovered that the ethernet connection was down, so I enabled the WiFi which unfortunately could not detect the network. Somewhat worried that my ethernet card might have fried I tested the connection on my tablet and it couldnt connect either. However, my tablet could connect to the wireless and since 11:30 that is what I have been using.

I went to the library around 2 to meet a group from my Technical Presentations class, about our presentation tomorrow. A fairly productive meeting for once, but when I got back to my dorm I found this note on the door:

The Power Is Out...

I am not sure why they want us to use electricity sparingly, but I am sure it is for a good reason. I still havent seen any physical plant or electrical company employees fixing anything or even any IT guys trying to get the wired LAN back up in the building.

Of course I spoke to someone shortly who lives in another hall and they just had a brownout, yet now it is sunny, so I am hoping that is just a sign they are trying to get the issue resolved.

Either way this is a bit of a pain, as I need to get work done and doing so under the power of my small desk lamp and LCD monitor glow just isnt going to be good when it gets later in the night.

UPDATE:

Well around 6:30 we started to experience some strange things with the electricity. My desk lamp and my roomate’s desklamps both got really dim. I thought maybe my lightbulb was on its last leg at first. My roomate went ahead and shut down his computer, and a few seconds later our power went back out. About 30 seconds later, the power came back on and everything was back to working order including all the lights. Also the LAN is back online! I am sure glad that they were able to get everything fixed before tonight….

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The Great Navel Orange Race

Sunday, April 8th, 2007

In the months of March and April there becomes a strong sense of competition in the halls of the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science as students enrolled in EGN 1007 – Engineering Concepts and Methods (Intro to Engineering) build boats to compete in the Great Navel Orange Race. GNOR as we shall call it, is a design competition in which teams of 3-5 must build a boat which can hold an orange and shuttle it around the UCF Reflection Pond. The fastest teams get to compete in a finals round which has a prize for 3 years of textbooks paid for. The competition was on Friday.

I spent the better part of thursday and all of that night working on stuff relating to GNOR. First of all, we had to have an AutoCAD drawings of our project, which is one piece of software I just dont really gel with. So after downloading the 2008 trial, I found myself spending 5 or so hours in AutoCAD painfully recreating my teams watercraft to the best of my abilities. I was also the editor of the tech report, and that was a nightmare. One group member wrote his entries so poorly it made my roomate and I bust into laughter while still wondering how this person got into college.

I knew it would be an all-nighter in order to get things done. Around midnight me and my roomate frantically tried to connect to the Engineering remote system so we could write programs in MATLAB as required for the tech report. After 45 minutes of failing to find some way I got the bright idea to use the MATLAB online trial, which nearly took both of ours 2 hour allotted trial time to write the m-file and run it. At 3:00 AM the delivery guy from Silver Mine Subs brought us our late night dinner. After more editing, my groups tech report was done and my roomate sent his part off to his group. Feeling accomplished we went to go see if they were setting up yet at 5 AM, but they wernt and instead we wondered around campus trying to get into Engineering III, discovered a 24 hour computer lab, and also found many caches of easter eggs in the grass everywhere.

At 7:35 my roomate and his group checked in and I was suppossed to as well, but talked to my TA and told her we would be back at 12:30. I watched the first boats go and some were quite interesting, including the one made from K’nex. My speech class was semi-cancelled, so I was there for only 15 minutes and no EGN Lecture. Came back at 12:30, but was told that we had to come back at 2:20 instead. Me and my one friend could make it but would be close with us both having physics classes that get out at 2:20. I skipped out of class a few minutes early and ran to the pond (luckily Math and Physics is right next door), to make the cutoff. My friend joined up with me shortly and we made our way to the starting lanes.

As soon as pre-race prep was complete, the horn was blown. I put our boat in the water, but it made a very sharp U-turn, so I went reclaimed it and set it back the right way. It still turned, but this time into the outer wall. I was thinking “What is happening…Our test run an hour ago, it went perfectly straight!” I made another reset and this time it hit a ballon obsticle which was good. For some reason the ballow gave it the ability to navigate a bit better until a water jet from the fountain caused it to turn back towards a wall. Soon enough the 5 minute horn was called. We didnt win, but it doesnt really matter. It was fun, and only like 6 boats finished. The hard part was getting through my 3 hour physics lab afterwards….

Enough with reading, here are some pictures of my group’s boat:

A not so great start...